Bart Schneemann

Bart Schneemann was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1954. He completed his studies in The Netherlands with Han de Vries in 1977. His early gained orchestra experience led to his appointment as principal oboist of the celebrated Rotterdam Philharmonic Orch

Biography

Bart Schneemann was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1954. He completed his studies in The Netherlands with Han de Vries in 1977. His early gained orchestra experience led to his appointment as principal oboist of the celebrated Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra (chief conductor Valery Gergiev). He held this position until 1996 when he decided to focus on building a career as a soloist. As music director, he restyled and increased the artistic range and possibilities of the Netherlands Wind Ensemble which is recognized as being one of the best wind ensembles in the world. With them he concretizes and records extensively and the commission a large quantity of composers to write works especially for them. Bart Schneemann is a master in various fields of music. This fact, among other aspects, made him the unanimous winner of the prestigious 3M Music Laureate Prize in 1991. From 1995 - apart from playing his modern instrument - he started to play his baroque oboe more and more and started to rethink his way of playing the vast baroque oboe repertoire. He is now equally comfortable on both instruments. Apart from playing the standard repertoire, he plays a huge amount of contemporary works. His virtuoso and musically sensitive playing has attracted the attention of many first rate contemporary composers. Several of them have written works especially for him including Tristan Keuris, Wolfgang Rihm, John Zorn, Theo Verbey, Giia Kantcheli and Kevin Volans. Bart has performed as a soloist with conductors like Valery Gergiev, Edo de Waart, Hartmut Haenchen, Thierry Fischer, Lev Markiz, Frans Brüggen, Roy Goodman and Ton Koopman. Apart from playing, he holds the position of oboe professor at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague.